DARPA to Host Hypersonic Thermal Management Material Design Program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will conduct a Proposers Day on Jan. 22 in Arlington, Va., to discuss a new program that aims to build and demonstrate structures designed to address the thermal challenge associated with hypersonic vehicles’ leading edges.

“For decades people have studied cooling the hot leading edges of hypersonic vehicles but haven’t been able to demonstrate practical concepts in flight,” Bill Carter, program manager at DARPA’s defense sciences office, said in a statement published Monday.

“The key is developing scalable materials architectures that enable mass transport to spread and reject heat,” Carter said of the Materials Architectures and Characterization for Hypersonics program.

The MACH program’s first technical area will develop passive thermal management platform designed to reduce the temperature of leading edges based on thermal design and scalable net-shape production process.

The second area will use high-fidelity computation capabilities to come up with active and passive thermal management materials, coatings and concepts for future cooled leading edge applications.

DARPA will describe the two technical areas in a broad agency announcement slated for release in mid-January.